Sandalsand Norge >>
As in previous years, I will summarise what adventures I had in 2018 around the world and in Norway. There was no lack of them. Many have been shared with you readers and more will come. Sandalsand publishes trips and travel related impressions on two websites: Global and Norway. There are also profiles on Instagram and Twitter.
Sandalsand Global
My Easter holiday was not the traditional Norwegian one with snow, skiing and oranges in the mountains. I went to Kyiv and Minsk. Or the capital cities of Ukraine and Belarus, if you prefer. It was a somewhat unusual Easter vacation, but it was a success.
Spring provided opportunities for city visits to both Budapest (with an excursion to the Danube Bend) and Helsinki. What was this year’s great journey, however, took place during the summer. In just three weeks I had a tenting tour of southern Africa, primarily a safari in Namibia and Botswana. I also managed to insert short visits to Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Qatar and Dubai. A wonderful trip in every way.
I published 39 new articles on the website, which increased the number to 851 plus 37 menu pages. The number of photos only increased by a few hundred to 8,978, but then I have yet to upload photos from the summer vacation. I never got around to publish my accounts from the trip to Africa, and I still have a few articles left from Helsinki. The number of clicks on the website reached almost 39,000.
This autumn I made my web pages secure by installing an SSL certificate. Thus, there is now a padlock in the address bar on browsers and the address has been preceded by https. This did not work smoothly, and both websites saw a significant drop in terms of visits. By the end of the year, the visits did not seem to have recovered properly.
Collage showing one tiny caption from Norway, or rather a Russian border post across the river. The rest are from the 11 foreign countries I visited in 2018. (Click to expand)
Sandalsand Norge (Norway)
This is the website that is used to describe impressions from my own country, in Norwegian. Readers of Sandalsand Norge received 59 new articles from all over the country in 2018. The advantage of running a website is that articles can be updated with new facts, new pictures, or new maps if they can give readers an added value. In 2018, I did a major rework of almost all articles to make them even more readable: More headlines, shorter sections, shorter sentences.
The entire website now consists of 595 articles plus 30 regular pages. The latter will be found in the menus at the top and bottom of the page. Last year, I wrote that the Norwegian site contained 8,400 photographs, up from 6,800 the year before. By the end of 2018, there are now 10,128 images. That’s a lot. Site clicks ended at 138,000.
My Norway travels in 2018 brought me to, among other places, East Finnmark, the Oslo area, Trondheim, Inner Vestland and Valdres, besides my own region in southern Rogaland. The collage above shows only one picture from Norway, and is in fact a border post on the Russian side of Grense Jakobselv (border river).
Other Social media
I uploaded 100 new pictures on Sandalgram, which is my account at Instagram. The number of followers is decreasing and is now just about 513. At Sandaltweet (Twitter), I regularly share interesting articles, even beyond my own. However, I do not involve myself in discussions or direct communications with other Twitter users. The number of Twitter followers is now up to 6,504.
Read more
Year-end reviews: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.
Wishes for the coming year(s): 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.
